Re: GG: The Firebird that is creativity...

["K. Berry" <kb@cs.umb.edu>]

    I wish he had gone on, because I
    think he would have arrived -- he would written some fascinating music.

Fascinating, yes, but I suspect he had an accurate handle on himself,
and knew he simply was not a composer in the classical (pun intended :-)
sense of the word.

Somewhere (Bach Reader?) there was a discussion of Bach's rules for
writing figured basses, and a quote to the effect that Bach thought ``if
you can't come up with interesting melodic ideas, you should take up
some other line of work''.  And in that one throwaway sentence lies the
magic of music for me -- although I can appreciate Gould's compositions
formally (as much as my theory-limited knowledge allows), they don't
strike any particular emotional resonance for me.  To me, his attemps
really were like Brahms (Opus 1, of course) or Schoenberg or whatever.
I don't need to know any theory to appreciate Bach.  

Gould knew more about music and could analyze it more deeply than I or
99.99% of humanity ever could, but knowing it in the abstract and coming
up with those infernal interesting melodic ideas are two different
things, it seems.  Of course his radio compositions are compositions, he
sure put an unimaginable amount of work into them, they're endlessly
fascinating, but they aren't *music*, at least to my ears.

It's a mystery.